


Golden

by Argenteus_Draco



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Gen, Memory Loss, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha's memory works too well, Past Relationship(s), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), character sketch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 08:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17220764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argenteus_Draco/pseuds/Argenteus_Draco
Summary: On the day before they are supposed to leave, Natasha makes the last minute decision to cut eight inches off of her hair, and bleach it a light blond. “A wig would have done just as well,” Peggy Carter comments when she arrives for the final briefing. Natasha shrugs.“New life,” she says. “New me.”Agent Carter watches her out of the corner of her eye for the rest of the afternoon.Set in the same universe as Soldiers and Spies and Avengers. The first in a series based upon Loki's conversation with Natasha in The Avengers.





	Golden

**Author's Note:**

> For my mother.

_And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf's back_

_Riding along a forest path_

_To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar_

_In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,_

_Pining behind massive walls._

_There gardens surround a palace all of glass;_

_There Firebirds sing by night_

_And peck at golden fruit._

_~Yakov Polonsky, "A Winter's Journey"_

* * *

 

The bottle of bleach sits on the counter of the bathroom sink, beside the dye brush, the comb, and the sectioning clips. The hair she already cut lays haphazard on the floor. Her reflection looks back at her in the mirror, and in it she sees a younger version of herself.

_Bozhe moi._

The door to their hotel room opens and clicks shut, the lock slides into place. “Natasha?”

“In here.”

Steve pushes the door to the tiny bathroom open, and watches her for a moment as she continues to stare critically at her reflection. Finally, he asks, “Natasha, what are you doing?”

She sighs, and finally picks up the tools she’s assembled. “Something stupid.”

* * *

 

Natasha Romanoff is used to having to look over her shoulder. But as a Red Room operative, as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent, she had always lived her life in the shadows, on the fringes of the circles she was tasked with infiltrating. She came and went easily, blended in, her face forgettable. But things are different since becoming an Avenger, since New York and Sokovia and Lagos and Berlin. 

She hates to erase the signature of the person she’s become, but she’s made it necessary.

* * *

 

The first time Natasha dyes her hair blond, she is twenty-one, newly turned to S.H.I.E.L.D., and reporting directly to Peggy Carter.

Even in the Red Room, people had spoken the name Carter with a degree of awe. Natasha had not been surprised to learn that the woman was still working even at the venerable age of 84. What had surprised her was to find Agent Carter in the common mess hall of the Triskellion, carrying the same gray cafeteria tray as every other agent having lunch in the room.

“Would you believe,” she says, catching Natasha’s look as she settles herself at their table, “that no one else in this building knows how to brew a proper cup of tea?” She illustrates her point by testing the temperature of the water with the tip of her finger before dropping her tea bag in, and carefully measuring out her sugar before she directs her attention to Clint Barton. “So this is your latest stray? The little Russian ballerina?”

Natasha bristles at the title, but doesn’t say anything.

“Natasha Romanoff,” Clint says, by way of introduction. “Nat, this is—”

“I know who you are.” She meets Peggy Carter’s keen stare for the first time, and further explains, “My whole upbringing was designed around making an army of yous.”

“How flattering,” Agent Carter replies dryly. “But I am glad to see the old arts aren’t being ignored in favor of all this new tech. I have a job for you, if you want it.”

Natasha blinks, the only sign of her continued surprise. “Ma’am?”

“It would mean going back.” The implication is clear. Natasha hasn’t set foot on Russian soil for eleven months now, and part of her would be greatful never to do so again. “I understand if it’s too much. But I would consider it a favor.”

Natasha owes the good people in the world a few favors.

“What’s the mission?”

* * *

 

In the official report the target’s name is Avdotya Ignatiev, but Peggy Carter knew her as Dottie Underwood. There are plenty of records documenting the time she spent in the United States, her work with Leviathan and then as her own agent, her capture by the FBI, and of course how she had come to escape. After her disappearance in Los Angeles though, the reports are scattered. A possible sighting in Mexico City. Blurry security footage from an airport terminal in London. And now this, a hospital admittance in Troitsk.

“Does this seem like bait to anyone else?” Clint asks, looking over her shoulder at the file. Natasha scowls. It does, but she doesn’t need to tell him that.

She spends a week coaching Clint and three other agents on their Russian. Ostensibly, all of them are being sent to investigate a HYDRA cell that Natasha herself had informed on. She is the only one with a secondary mission.

On the day before they are supposed to leave, Natasha makes the last minute decision to cut eight inches off of her hair, and bleach it a light blond. “A wig would have done just as well,” Peggy Carter comments when she arrives for the final briefing. Natasha shrugs.

“New life,” she says. “New me.”

Agent Carter watches her out of the corner of her eye for the rest of the afternoon.

* * *

 

“Wow.” Steve looks her up and down as she exits the bathroom, toweling the last moisture out of her hair. “That’s certainly… wow, Nat.”

She snorts laughter, throws a smirk at him over her shoulder. “You don’t like it?”

“Oh,” Steve says in reply, “I like it.”

Bad humor on both of their parts, but it’s always been so easy between them. “And here I thought you preferred brunettes.”

“Peggy was the exception,” Steve tells her. “Not the rule. Ask Bucky some time. He was so determined to find me a date he must have talked to every eligible blond in New York.”

As he talks, she catches her reflection in the television, only instead of Steve standing behind her it’s Peggy Carter, stroking her bleach-blond hair and whispering soothing words after that disasterous mission. Never again, she had thought then. Not to say that her hair color had had anything to do with how things had turned out, but it reminded her of those four days, of running from her own sisters, as she was doing once again.

Natasha was not a superstitious sort, but she was sentimental, and this seemed appropriate.

* * *

 

The HYDRA cell is a bust, so Natasha splits from the group on the second day. The two hour bus ride from the center of Moscow is exactly as boring as Natasha remembers it being. She’s always hated winter here, the gloom, the dark, and most of all the penetrating, bone-deep cold that tries to lull her to sleep when she needs to remain at her sharpest.

At every stop she scans the faces of those boarding the bus, and those crowded on the street below, hoping that there’s nothing familiar to be found there.

When a girl of maybe seven gets on alone and takes the empty seat across the aisle from Natasha, she gets off anyway and walks to another stop, just in case. She doesn’t know the Red Room’s youngest girls any more.

As they approach the hospital, she thinks she sees a silhouette of a man out the corner of her eye, broad shoulders listing just slightly to the left— but that may just be wishful thinking.

* * *

 

She flirts her way past the front desk. At the nurses’ station, she puts on her best impersonation of Clint’s deeply midwestern American accent and explains that she was adopted and is doing geneological research about her birth family and she took a DNA test and discovered she was Russian of all things, always thought she was French and Swedish and anyway, she thinks one of the women on the ward might be her grandmother and was hoping that she could be introduced; the nurse gives her a room number mostly, she thinks, to shut her up. Natasha all but skips off to Dottie Underwood’s room.

She is asleep.

“Anticlimatic,” Natasha says to herself, closing the door behind her.

Unlike Peggy Carter, the years have not been so kind to Dottie. She’s frail, her hair thin and white, the veins stark against her skin. Natasha waits against the wall, silent and still, until she is sure that the woman is truly out of it, then she starts to search the room. There is very little by way of personal effects: a few changes of clothes in the drawers of the bedside table; a book on the top; some costume jewelry in a box with the red lipstick of her youth that she hasn’t given up.

Dottie stirs in the bed just as Natasha is closing the last drawer. “Who’re you?”

She weighs her options for a moment. Then she answers, “Peggy Carter sent me.”

There is no recognition in Dottie’s answering gaze.

One of the nurses knocks lightly on the door before pushing it open. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking pointedly at Natasha, “but visiting hours are over.”

She recognizes Yelena’s face underneath the dark brown wig and the makeup that makes her appear older than she is, but can’t tell if she herself has been recognized.

“I’ll come back tomorrow, nan,” Natasha says, reaching out to squeeze Dottie’s hand before she leaves, all bright eyes and smiles again.

* * *

 

The next day, Dottie calls her Whitney and rambles for a long time about zero matter while Natasha, bored, searches the room again, this time for signs of the Red Room’s other agents. There is nothing of the sort, but when she opens the top drawer of the bedside table, she finds a star scratched into the soft particle board, and her heart skips a beat.

“I don’t know what it means,” Clint says when she tells him about her discovery later.

“It means we aren’t the only ones looking for Dottie Underwood,” she answers.

“We knew that already.”

“I can take my sisters,” Natasha replies, throwing herself backward onto the bed and thus missing Clint’s raised eyebrow to her choice of words. “This means we’re up against the last person in the world I’d want to have to fight.”

* * *

 

Two of the agents enter the hospital before her, gaining access through the overcrowded emergency department. Clint posts the other in a building across the street and takes a position on the roof himself. Natasha enters in her usual manner. For the first time, Dottie is awake and alert when she arrives.

“Peggy Carter sent you?”

Natasha nods.

“Knew she’d catch up eventually.” She smirks at Natasha. “Took her long enough.”

“We’re here to get you out.”

“I don’t need S.H.I.E.L.D.’s help.”

“They helped me.”

Dotties scoffs. “Helped you with what?” Natasha is silent while Dottie continues to stare at her. Then, finally, understanding seems to dawn. “I thought I knew your face. You could be me fifty years ago. In fact I think you were.” She sits up as straight as she can manage in the bed, eyeing Natasha carefully. “Why did you leave, _mladshaya sestra_?”

She needs Dottie to trust her, so she answers honestly. “They took everything from me.”

“The world takes. It doesn’t know any other way.” Dottie sighs, apparently disappointed. “Go if you want. But the Red Room looks after it’s own. And it never forgets.”

No, Natasha thinks. It doesn’t, and it taught her to do the same.

“They won’t forget your betrayal, either. S.H.I.E.L.D. can offer you—”

The window explodes. Natasha pulls Dottie Underwood from the bed, but not fast enough— the bullet pierces just below her collar bone. Natasha can feel blood pooling as she hoists the old woman so that her arm is across her shoulders, and starts to run.

Yelena is waiting for them in the hall, gun drawn. “ _Stoy_!” she shouts. Natasha kicks the weapon from her hands, and Dottie grunts in pain as it jerks her forward. It’s a move Yelena must recognize, but Natasha doesn’t have time for anything else.

“You! How did you—?”

“Someone thinks she’s worth killing,” Natasha snaps back. Then, turning to Dottie, she asks, “What do you know?”

Dottie Underwood’s answering stare is cold and distant, and Natasha realizes she is already losing her. “Better that it dies with me.” She takes a rattling breath, and coughs more blood onto Natasha’s jacket. “What will you do, _mladshaya sestra_? Try to save me? Save her? Or save yourself?”

Natasha knows what she would have chosen two years ago, and isn’t proud of it.

“I thought so,” Dottie says. Her eyes drift shut, and Natasha shakes her, but can’t get her to rouse. Her pulse is there, but weak.

She practically throws Dottie at Yelena, shouts, “Follow me,” and hopes to God the girl isn’t too stupid to listen this time.

The escape route she planned avoids the most public areas of the hospital, but can’t avoid them all. She’s counting on Clint and the others to cover her. There are more gunshots, too sporadic to be the one hunting them. Natasha knows how precise HYDRA’s favorite weapon is, knows the most likely places he will try to pick her off—

A computer monitor shatters behind her. The next shot strikes an oxygen tank, and the resulting explosion sends both her and Yelena crashing to their knees. Someone — more than one someone — screams, and Natasha rolls out of the way of several pairs of stampeding feet.

“Natalia…”

“Get up.” She helps haul Yelena and Dottie back up. No one pays them any mind in their panic. “How many?”

“Three of us inside.” Yelena smirks, and amends, “Four if you count yourself.”

“I don’t. Move.” She leads the way to a service stair, less crowded than the main emergency exit. “Anyone outside besides the Soldier?”

Yelena stops abruptly. “It couldn’t be—”

“I take it he isn’t part of your plan, then. Great.” Three players in the game, and the odds stacked severely against her. Yelena goes pale.

“He’ll kill us all.”

“Probably.”

She drops Dottie at the base of the stairwell and keeps going. “What are you doing?!”

“She’s expendable,” Yelena says. Then, pausing briefly to aim her bites at Natasha, she adds, “I have to get them out. You want to stop me? Go ahead.”

Natasha’s hand twitches toward her own weapon, but doesn’t draw it. Yelena disappears. Didn’t you learn in São Paulo? she thinks. We’re all expendable. But it doesn’t matter. When she kneels to lift Dottie again, she finds that the bleeding has stopped, and her chest is still.

Natasha pauses just long enough to close the woman’s eyes. Then she vaults the railing and drops the remaining two floors to the ground level. She bursts out the door and finds herself facing the Winter Soldier at the end of the hall.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

She runs. More gunshots, from a pistol this time, and finally Clint’s voice in her earpiece swearing colorfully before he says “Natasha, what is going on down there?”

“Explaination later,” she answers, ducking behind a desk. “East wing, I need cover and extraction.”

The Soldier doesn’t worry about being seen from the windows. He also doesn’t worry about arrows fired from a neighboring rooftop, but one of them lodges itself in his right shouder all the same. Natasha winces and offers up a silent apology before she jumps up again and goes to engage him hand to hand. He fires wildly as she grabs the shaft for leverage. Her other fist catches him upside his head, stunning him just long enough for her to push her sleeve back and jam her bites against the seam where his metal shoulder meets flesh. She holds it there until it crackles, even as one of his bullets ricochets and catches her in the upper thigh, then flings the ruined weapon behind her as she takes off.

There is another explosion, large enough this time that Natasha feels the heat from flames erupting at her back. She sprints as hard as she can for the door, doesn’t look back until she is several blocks away. The whole hospital is burning.

“Clint,” she says, pressing her earpiece, “tell me you got out of there.”

* * *

 

The three empty seats on the quinjet haunt Natasha for weeks.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Clint offers weakly.

No. Maybe not. It could have been the Soldier’s bullets hitting any number of flammable equipment. It could have been Yelena, who doesn’t share Natasha’s scruples about innocents caught in the middle of the fire. But it could just as easily have been her.

You could be me fifty years ago. Dottie Underwood’s words echo in Natasha’s head. A year ago she would have let her compatriots burn and not felt an ounce of guilt. Now…

“New life,” Peggy Carter tells her sadly, at the end of her debrief. “New you.”

* * *

 

Natasha pauses at the door, shifting the full bag of cheap takeout to her other hand so that she can reach the keycard with the other. She can hear Steve on the other side, conversing with Bucky via web link. She knocks the door open with her hip and makes for the cluttered desk to start sorting the containers.

“Hold up,” Bucky says. “Who was that?”

Natasha steps back into the frame and lets him take in her altered appearance.

“I hate it,” he deadpans. “Change it back.”

“Steve likes it.”

“Hey, come on, don’t bring me into this—” But Natasha isn’t listening. Something in Bucky’s face shifts as he continues to stare at her, and she knows he’s seeing the same thing she did.

“You were in Troitsk,” he says in Russian. “In the hospital.”

“I was.”

“You were… oh God, I—”

“Odessa hurt more,” she says, switching back to English, clueing Steve into the abrupt change in his friend’s behavior. Bucky’s eyes go sort of unfocused again while he thinks, and then his expression softens again as he recognizes her acceptance of his unspoken apology.

“Hey,” he says after a moment, “could we talk about that?”

Natasha hesitates before she says, as calmly as she can manage, “If you want.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking uncomfortable but determined. “It helps.”

She recognizes the expression staring back at her through those big blue eyes. He wants so badly to do good.

Natasha still owes the good people of the world a few favors. So she sits down next to Steve, and settles in to talk.


End file.
